Monday, 3 October 2011

The Sudanese straw-men

Protesters in Khartoum kept the riot
police rather busy over the past week. In several residential areas people took
to the streets equipped with frying pans, pots and jerrycans to vent their
frustration over the steep rise in living costs. The protesters demanded the
dismissal of the finance minister and the enforcement of government controls on
the prices of basic commodities. The authorities responded with the classics,
police and propaganda. Senior officials of the ruling National Congress Party
(NCP) accused unspecified political forces of exploiting the post-secession
economic slump to further their regime change agenda, and complained of a
Western conspiracy against the country. Nafie Ali Nafie, the Deputy Chairman of
the NCP, put the blame on a certain "communist with some money” whom he accused of orchestrating
the largely nocturnal hunger riots. The alleged communist’s long arm, however,
reached out to al-Elafoon, a centre of Sufi brotherhoods at a short distance
from Khartoum, where worshipers from the main mosque, under the influence of
the local Imam, took to the streets following the Friday prayers to protest
against the deteriorating living conditions. The same area had welcomed
President Bashir some months ago promising allegiance to the last man, woman
and child. Evidently, the NCP will find it difficult to sustain its patronage
network at the cheap. Contrary to common wisdom the weakest link in the chain
is none other than Khartoum itself, and not the peripheral war zones.

Slump is arguably an understatement. Early
in September the governor of Sudan’s central Bank, Mohamed Khair al-Zubair,
asked Arab counterparts to feed the safes of the Sudanese financial system.
Al-Zubair stated that the country needs a minimum of 4 billion US dollars this
year to make it through the oil deprivation crunch. Apparently his plea was
left unanswered. Bashir welcomed the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this
past week, not a particular favourite of the richer Arabs. While Bashir wished
for greater economic cooperation Ahmadinejad did his regular piece, Islamic
solidarity against the Western conspirators. Talking to the press in Paris last
Thursday Sudan’s foreign minister said the economy of the country faces
collapse unless the international community provides Khartoum with badly needed
assistance. Back in Khartoum he claimed to have secured French cooperation
regarding the relief of Sudan’s burgeoning foreign debt, estimated last
December at 31.9 billion US dollars. In short, Khartoum is petitioning all
around for aid.

On the other pole the Secretary General
of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in North Sudan (SPLM-N), Yasir Arman,
entertained audiences in the United States and the United Kingdom over the past
two weeks with the themes of war in Sudan’s new south. The highlight of Arman’s
campaign was the Prendergastian plea for the international enforcement of a no-fly
zone over Darfur, the Blue Nile and South Kordofan, justified by the responsibility
to protect (R2P). In a Bashir-style speech to the Sudanese political class in
London Arman referred to Khartoum’s protesters as the heroes of the impending
regime change. In the custom of the opposition effendi Arman blamed the NCP for
destroying the economy and impoverishing the nation. His best though was the
argument that President Bashir even destroyed the Islamic Movement which Hassan
al-Turabi had spent decades to build from a student organisation to a capable
power machine. The convenience is surely telling. The split in the Islamic Movement
is now considered another of Bashir’s uncountable vices. It seems even the long
demonised Turabi is amenable to rehabilitation in the heat of effendiya resistance
to the NCP.

More telling I suppose is the parallel
between Karti’s rendezvous in France and Arman’s US-UK tour; both demonstrate the
profound extraversion of Sudan’s rulers, past, actual or hopeful. Even Nimayri,
whom the Sudanese dethroned by popular revolt lives in the memory of many an
effendi as the man who begged abroad to give us back at home, a reference to
the favours in cash and kind that he was so apt at begetting from his US patrons
and their allies in the Gulf, favours that now glare at the Sudanese in the form
of a 31.9 billion dollar bill. Bayart possibly phrased it best. He forwarded
the proposition that “the leading actors in sub-Saharan societies have tended
to compensate for their difficulties in the autonomization of their power and
in intensifying the exploitation of their dependents by deliberate recourse to
the strategies of extraversion, mobilizing resources derived from their (possibly
unequal) relationship with the external environment” whereby the external environment
“turned into a major resource in the process of political centralization and
economic accumulation” as well as the conduct of social struggles of subaltern actors.
Bayart’s dictum that African elites have
been active agents in the dependency misery of their societies echoes Fanon’s
denunciation of Africa’s straw-men, the heirs of the colonial state. Arman the ‘secular
democrat’ and Karti the ‘Islamist autocrat’ are no strangers to this legacy.